May 22, 2017

Robert Redford and Paul Newman were openly dismissive that people appreciated their good looks more than their acting. In Val Kilmer we have one of the best looking actors who appears to have done open battle with being just a pretty face.

Kilmer is experiencing a sort of Twitter Renaissance, a perfect antidote to how people use Twitter to divide a nation. Twitter can be used to reach out to people and build bridges.

My favorite quote about adolescent Hollywood comes from the brilliant writer Steve Kloves. "It was much more entertaining to watch my daughter grow up," he quips, "than it was to wait for a 50-year-old movie executive to grow up."

In a recent Guardian interview, Kilmer said, " I can’t go through an airport without someone saying ‘I’m your huckleberry.’" I always think of him as Jim Morrison in The Doors: "Where's your will to be weird?"

Watching Kilmer and Tom Sizemore fill the space around De Niro in Heat is sublime.

And there are the duds, so many of which do not seem to be his fault. Take Kilmer's starring role in Mamet's Spartan. It's more a statement of how Mamet can direct hideously awkward dialogue versus how Paul Newman can shape Mamet's dialogue into something as brilliant as The Verdict.

Kilmer's painting is the statement of a serious artist, not a pretty boy floating through life as a film star. Check out Kilmer's profound painting at The Guardian, especially versus the record selling ($110 million) Basquiat. The Basquiat is a commentary on the state of painting, exposed in Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word. Whereas Kilmer's painting stops you for a look.

May 15, 2017

There's a new documentary about Cary Grant dropping acid, something I wrote about in 2011. I also highlighted Steve Jobs's shared experience of tripping and how people who have made the psychedelic journey are put off by people who have not.

For those of you who have already confronted the collective unconscious, there's not much new material, but plenty new about Cary Grant from other sources.

Cary Grant used to say that he was a self-made man and had pulled himself up by his own boot straps. While he came from humble roots and a mentally ill mother, only God could make a face like his.

My favorite stories about Cary Grant come from literary actors, those exceptional talents who know how to write. Frank Langella wrote in his gregarious Dropped Names that Tony Curtis said of Cary Grant: "He was one of my idols. The guy turns out to be a fucking bore."

Langella recounts how Mel Brooks said the same thing of Grant: "I thought I'd kill myself if I had to eat a meal with this guy again." Every time I see Langella interviewed, I feel the exact same pain as watching De Niro be interviewed. The interviewer is inevitably not up to the task.

David Niven recounts several Cary Grant stories in his beautifully written autobiography Bring On The Empty Horses. He describes Grant as a 'will-o-wisp,' at best elusive to pin down as a person. Niven describes a Grant as relentlessly bent on self-improvement:

"'I just think myself thin - and it happens', he was fond of saying, but he conveniently forgot his frugal eating, his daily work-outs and his appointments with the masseur."

"Some of us suffered stoically through his days of the carrot." Niven recounts the happy explosion of the carrot juice machine after Grant had declared "Today we'll have nothing but carrot juice."

Niven ends with Grant's LSD therapy and the result: "It seemed to the rest of us a most hazardous trip for Cary to have taken to find out what we could have told him anyway: that he had always been self-sufficient, that he had always been loved, and that he would continue to give a damn about himself."

Last week I pointed out the curiously public crisis that Brad Pitt is undergoing. Now we have Cary Grant to remind us that people who make their living in the public eye invite sardonic commentary as they move through life's trials.

May 8, 2017

Look below the surface and you will see a psychological turning point. All such crises are awkward and embarrassing for the people going through them, not just the witnesses, but the poor bastard who thinks his life is unraveling in front of his eyes and without any control.

When the crises is played out in front of millions of adoring fans, it must be like a public flailing. All of the pain and suffering of Brad Pitt is there, for everyone to see in the GQ interview. I wrote a piece about the problems of fame, especially as it pertains to Brad Pitt.

Brad Pitt - and a lot of beautiful Hollywood actors - represent the very essence of the Puer Aeternus, the man who continues to live as an adolescent. It is telling that Pitt says that not a day has gone by without booze or a spiff. This is one of the ways the puer maintains his floating above the ground lifestyle. Alpine sports, which I explore extensively in my novel Powder Dreams, is another popular one. Hollywood certainly makes it easier for the pampered star to ignore the base elements of the grounded man, although Ty Burr in Gods Like Us brilliantly illustrates that this might be disappearing.

In middle age one of two things happens to the puer. Either they die or they abandon the lifestyle. Jung said to Marie Louise von Franz that the only way for the puer to escape the clutches of the archetype is through work. Pitt goes on at some length about how he works every day with his hands and how making film takes up less of his time.

The entire Brad Pitt interview is reminder of what the Ancient Greeks knew: Suffering is knowledge. And suffering publicly could drive a sane man to seek comfort in old habits.

May 28, 2016

I've written about the difficulty of turning le Carré novels into films and watched A Most Wanted Man with a sense of dread that would not allow me to finish the film.

Recently the BBC and AMC teamed up to make The Night Manager into a six-part miniseries and I approached it with the exact same dread. But the writers, David Farr and John le Carré himself, did a very odd thing. They exposed some of le Carré's weaknesses as a writer:

- Le Carré consistently steers a reader into deep bouts of characterization and can make a scene last longer than a marathon without boring the readers.

- In sticking with these two strengths, le Carré consistently neglects plot and allows cynicism about institutions (read here: paternal roles) to leave a reader hopeless about the state of the world.

All of that was corrected in The Night Manager series. The bad guys get what's coming to them. The good guy is not left helplessly beaten. The fuckers in government are slapped. And the various pieces of plot are woven together to keep the story moving. It is the most cheerful and dramatically rewarding changing of a story I've ever seen.

Feb 20, 2016

Literary biography should be a guilty pleasure. A good reader can guess the origins of beautifully written novels, but a good reader inevitably wants to know the person who wrote such powerful work.

What we repeatedly find out is that the great artist performs a kind of alchemy, turning an often shitty life into deeply absorbing and moving art.

The literary biographer's task can be tricky. How do you examine the artistic process when the writer is not necessarily the thing of dreams while his work clearly is? It takes great subtlety and a powerful sense of scope.

There are some excellent examples of such biographers. Frances Donaldson's P. G. Wodehouse: A Biography. Joseph Blotner's Faulkner: A Biography. Ron Chernow is one of my favorite biographers and approaches his subjects as lively and interesting people who must be approached with intelligence.

Adam Sisman's John le Carré: The Biography is not one of those sympathetic biographies. After reading the first third of the book, I started to wonder if Sisman liked his subject at all. In the Introduction, Sisman records that le Carré said, "I know it's supposed to be warts and all, but so far as I can gather it's going to be all warts and no all."

Le Carré has repeatedly said that writers are liars, but Sisman seems to have taken him at his word. Extremely at his word.

It's a mistake to publish a biography of a living subject. It's even more a mistake to get so close to your subject that you cannot see the magic of misery. I sometimes read Sisman's book as a reference and have many of my working assumptions about le Carré confirmed, but it is not a biography that I can read all the way through. It's just too brutal.

Add this to my le Carré wishlist. One day someone will work on a biography about the symbols and archetypes that steer him in his work, adding as carefully as le Carré the details that hook you into his stories. Another wish is that le Carré himself would go back to his pre- Naive and Sentimental Lover mindset and find a rebirth in pure literary fiction. He's been using the espionage cover for his literary self for a very long time.

Feb 10, 2016

I had often wondered why the diaries of Robertson Davies had not been published. By all accounts he was a relentless journal writer and some surprising tidbits would come out of excerpts for his other writings. I can remember one journal entry in a collection of his essays where the day was so hot that he sat down at his desk shirtless, old and fat.

The first collection of Davies' diaries, A Celtic Temperament, was published last October. Davies had requested that his diaries not be published for a full twenty years after his death, which explains the timing.

I was once so absorbed in Davies' writing that I lost ten years of reading to being focused solely on him. This made me hesitant about jumping into his diaries, especially after reading Val Ross's Robertson Davies: A Portrait in Mosaic. That well-meant biographical sketch made Davies look like a pompous windbag at times.

But read A Celtic Temperament I did in less than three days and here's a glimpse:

Davies not only had sex but marked each occasion in his diary as H.T.D. Quill and Quire speculates that it stands for "High Tempo Debauchery" or "hic tempus delectat." At the end of the year Davies would tally the number of times he and his wife, Brenda, had H.T.D. He used some interesting adjectives to describe sex, the two most frequent were "admirable" and "surprising." They threw down on the bedroom floor, in a bay window, next to the Christmas tree. These are very odd images if you tend to think of Davies as an Edwardian gent who used to walk with a cane wearing a bowler.

The diary entries begin just after his play General Confession was ditched and end just as he's getting Massey College underway. I thought the selections odd. As I read, I began to see Davies' character change as he left his provincial and comfortable life in Peterborough and had to fight like hell to get Massey College launched. The transformation was remarkable.

There are some very endearing views of vices. He's disappointed that someone got drunk at a party while everybody else was there for two drinks. He notes his hangovers. He doesn't understand people who fuck without loving the fucked. By the time Massey launches he's so worn down that he just wants people to have good manners. I'm pretty sure that Davies would have joined Jennifer Lawrence in scolding people for living through their smartphones.

Davies complete diaries of more than three million words will supposedly be available in digital format sometime in 2017. I'm really looking forward to that.